Last November, a day after Turkish jets shot down a Russian Su-24 along the Syrian border, an angry Russian President Vladimir Putin lashed out, calling the incident "a stab in the back by the terrorists' accomplices."

His Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, responded with his own chest-thumping and finger pointing: "I think if there is a party that needs to apologize, it is not us. Those who violated our airspace are the ones who need to apologize."

Fast forward to August 9, when Erdogan is to meet in St. Petersburg with the man he called "my friend Vladimir" in an interview with Russian state news agency TASS ahead of the trip. "This will be a historic visit, a new beginning," Erdogan said.

After several weeks of contrite signals like that from Ankara, the Kremlin is confident that Erdogan wants to bury the hatchet and restore what had been a relatively robust trading relationship between the two Black Sea neighbors.